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Mendicant Orders

Entertainment / Literature / Mendicant Orders: Orders of wandering monks who lived by begging. In the Middle Ages, the clergy was divided into secular clergy and regular clergy. The secular (i.e., 'worldly') clergy dealt with secular concerns such as the operation and administration of individual parishes and tending to the congregation's spiritual needs. It was composed of the priests, bishops, archbishops, and cardinals. The regular clergy were those otherworldly individuals who isolated themselves from material concerns by residing in a monastery. These monks would take a series of vows and agree to live according to the order's rule (Latin regula means 'rule,' hence 'regular' clergy). While all the regular orders took a vow of poverty individually, the mendicant orders also took a vow of communal or corporate poverty, vowing to subsist entirely on begging from day-to-day, hence the name 'mendicant' or 'begging.' It was hoped that this sort of vow would prevent abuses that occurred in monasteries, in which individual monks had no personal wealth, but the monastery as a whole was a powerful corporate entity possessing thousands of acres of land and its collective income, allowing the 'impoverished' monks to often live a luxurious existence in spite of their individual vows of poverty. Some monasteries became such powerful landowning institutions that, at one point in England, it has been estimated that one-quarter to one-third of all available land was in the possession or control of various abbots. This situtation granted the monastic clergy political and financial power comparable to that of the secular branch of church, it was a far cry from the original intention of these monks to remove themselves from petty worldly matters in order to focus on spiritual contemplation. (also called friars)
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